Every Camera App Should Have Frameographer’s New ‘Smart Zoom’ Feature

The new 1.3 update to the stop-motion-animation app Frameographer has a new feature called Smart Zoom, and it is so obviously good that every video-shooting app for iOS should be using it already.

Studio Neat’s Smart Zoom uses the fact that the iPhone shoots video at 1080p (1920 x 1080 pixels), and yet the stills camera on the iPhone 4S is capable of capturing photos at 3264 x 2448 pixels. When zooming, the whole image is usually blown up and cropped. With Smart Zoom, the app just grabs a 1920 x 1080 square out of the 3264 x 2448 image. This will let you zoom up to 2X with no loss of image quality.

Now, stills-shooting apps wouldn’t gain anything from this as they already use the full sensor, but video apps should all be doing it. And even photo apps like Instagram could benefit, as they output pictures that are smaller than the whole available frame.